I have seen the future and it is stupid.

So that you don’t have to, I watched an episode of the Fox Network’s massively popular (among Americans) new game show, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? The answer to the question is, of course, no you aren’t.

The show pitted six contestants against each other. Five were charming little kids and one was an American adult with a college degree. He chose Grade 1 English and was asked “How many times does the letter e appear in the following phrase: ‘Pledge of Allegiance?’” For all us Canadians, that’s something Americans recite every day in school.

The crewcut, bull-necked young white male contestant struggled, his wife and child watching in the audience. Painful is not the word.

I was rhythmically hitting my head with a hardback copy of Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and scrunching up my face to weep, but the tears wouldn’t come somehow, only a gasping sadness.

The man began his calculations. “Well, there’s one e in ‘the.’” Then he said how tough it was not to have pencil and paper. Then the kids started giggling. It went downhill from there. As things do on Fox.

On the Fox website, even the viewers posting to the show’s message board couldn’t spell. It was way worse than Amazon.com reviews, the ones that Guardian Talk readers collect online like precious stones. The Washington Post, a literal-minded, ponderous and timorous newspaper, wrote about the Fox show but spectacularly missed the point, as always, by deploring the sad decline in the intellectual standards of game shows.

But a website loved by me, Defamer, advised readers not to link to the Post‘s lumpen history of how quiz shows reached their current Just Hold Up Two Fingers And I’ll Give You Ten Thousand Dollars! Can You Do That For Me, Guy? state, and instead ran a clip with the headline “Aren’t We All Dumber than a 5th Grader, When You Really Think About It?”

One viewer complained (complained!) that Fox was making money off stupid people, as if this were not an explanation of the entire history of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., from topless teenagers in the London Sun to the coarseness and racism of Fox News. But the trick of this game show is that Fox is profiting from the contestant’s stupidity while humiliating and mocking him for it.

It’s a circle of government and industry working in tandem: the Bush Administration guts the American education system, which makes Fox programming attractive to larger numbers of people, who are then ridiculed by people like me, but now also by Fox itself.

It’s an achievement, of sorts. The problem when you’re Canadian is that the show evokes not laughter but horror. I would pay not to watch this. I regret seeing it as much as I regret watching the beheading video of Daniel Pearl, another gift of the internet that I have repaid with nightmares and wishing I were already the coarse unfeeling heart-of-Plexiglass person I will inevitably become if I continue in this line of work.

Canadians don’t laugh at learning-disabled people. It’s not what civilized people do, and you learn that from your parents fast. Am I alone in being astonished at the return of the word “retard” to everyday conversation?

And it’s particularly wrong for an American audience to laugh at this guy because he’s so clearly the type of person the U.S. employs in the army and at border crossings. All that Homeland/Heartland nonsense spewed out by Fox and the U.S. government doesn’t disguise the fact that they despise these people even as they hunt their votes to sustain a tiny class of rich men with pale faces and scary glasses. I give you Dick Cheney, Roger Ailes, Kyle Sampson, Karl Roveâe¦

On that same day I saw this, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the man in charge of the Stalin-style purges of federal attorneys deemed to be “disloyal” to the Republican party, essentially pleaded for his job on the grounds that he was poor once and Hispanic to boot. So he had clawed his way out of poverty to a job where he essentially runs the American secret police, and asks that he be allowed to stay on by virtue of once having been the kind of person he’d stomp on now.

This is one of the virtues of a badly educated electorate. They fall for this reasoning.

When I say that a stupid future lies ahead, you might well think this a good thing for writers. All we have to do is aim our work at the stupid, which is presumably easier (shorter words, simplified ideas, no tangents, frequent use of the word “fave”). But the problem is that it takes more effort to write badly than to write well, and I’m lazy.

I speak as one who runs the gamut, a combination of educated and clueless.

The London Review of Books is my favourite publication. So I’m smart, right? No, because I think the nude fight scene in Borat is the funniest thing ever filmed. Simple-minded, then? No, I drool over the northern Flemish still-life painters of expired eels but Rembrandt leaves me cold. Complicated to the point of idiocy? No, I live for Margaret Atwood’s poetry, her most pared-down and greatest achievement. Just idiocy, then? No, my husband wouldn’t have married an idiot. He, who chose British newsrooms over a university education, is the most wise and clever person I know, and that’s not a compliment I hand out easily.

Being humane is the most important quality. The fact is that education is the fastest, best, cheapest and most joyous way to get citizens and civilizations to that point.

I watch Americans sink from the relative civilization of the late 19th century to the point where smart and beautiful children are paid to mock the stupid adult and I know what’s next: Bear-baiting.

We’re back in Elizabethan times, but without a Shakespeare.

This week

After much urging from my agent, Bruce Westwood, who gave his staff the day off so they could have a joint intellectual experience (imagine your boss doing that), I finally saw the German film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s first film.

It is a shattering study of fascism, courage, cowardice and all the human emotions that can lie behind a blank face. More than anything, it is about betrayal. You will be able to link each character to people you have encountered. Stasi Culture Dept. Lt.-Col. Grubitz, I know him well. Me, I’m probably the woman across the hall, protecting her daughter at the cost of moral death.

It is a mirror of the life we are leading now, and I urge you to see it.